US teen died after drinking caffeine too quickly, coroner says

A healthy teenager in the US state of South Carolina died from drinking several highly-caffeinated drinks too quickly, a coroner has ruled.
Davis Allen Cripe collapsed at a high school in April after drinking a McDonald’s latte, a large Mountain Dew soft drink and an energy drink in just under two hours, Gary Watts said.

The 16-year-old died from a “caffeine-induced cardiac event causing a probable arrhythmia”.
He had no pre-existing heart condition.

The teenager weighed 90kg (200 lbs) but would not have been considered morbidly obese, Mr Watts said.
“This is not a caffeine overdose,” Mr Watts told Reuters news agency.
“We’re not saying that it was the total amount of caffeine in the system, it was just the way that it was ingested over that short period of time, and the chugging of the energy drink at the end was what the issue was with the cardiac arrhythmia.”

Caffeine would probably not have been seen as a factor in the teenager’s death if witnesses had not been able to tell officials what he had been drinking before his death, the Richland County coroner said.
The main witness could not say which brand of energy drink Davis drank but said it was from a container the size of a large soft drink.